O’Flynn: Creighton seeking attention

Developer Michael O’Flynn believed the main purpose of a speech given by Lucinda Creighton TD two years ago was not about the lack of independence of politicians but to seek attention for herself, the High Court heard yesterday.

He was under cross-examination on the second day of his defamation action against Ms Creighton, who made a speech at a summer school two years ago in which she said, among other things, that there can be no room in Fine Gael for “cute-hoor politics”.

She also said her party in government must be “much more than Fianna Fáil-light” and cannot condemn that party for entertaining developers in the Galway Races tent while on the other hand extending the “biscuit tin for contributions from high profile developers who are beholden to Nama”.

Arising out of that speech to the MacGill Summer School, she gave an interview to RTÉ Radio in which she expressed unhappiness that Mr O’Flynn had financially supported a Fine Gael fundraising golf classic a few days earlier in the K Club at a time when he was one of the top ten indebted developers to Nama.

Ms Creighton denies she defamed him and says it was an opinion honestly held.

Asked yesterday by Paul O’Higgins SC, for Ms Creighton, if he agreed the message of the MacGill speech was that politicians should be more independent and not follow the party line, Mr O’Flynn said he had “a very cynical view of a lot of that speech”.

In an earlier exchanges with Mr O’Higgins, Mr O’Flynn disagreed there was anything wrong with supporting a political party. “I look down there [at the courtroom] and there is her husband [Senator Paul Bradford] who is also a politician and I contributed to his campaigns in the past.”

He said he gave money to Fine Gael “in good faith” when it asked him to enter a team for the golf classic.

Mr O’Flynn also agreed earlier that his attendance at the classic attracted a lot of media attention at the time but he did not accept it was a “major national topic”.

The Sunday Independent had published four pages on the event, on July 18, 2010, before the MacGill speech, but it was not all about him, Mr O’Flynn said.

He agreed his debt to Nama was “north of €1bn” and that Nama had paid €35bn for about €70bn in loans which had been made by certain Irish banks.

Being one of the “top 10” Nama developers meant those companies had large assets and incomes, he said, adding that it did not bring “extra contamination”.

The court also heard that after the Creighton radio interview and an article in The Irish Times, Mr O’Flynn sought an apology from her. There was correspondence between their legal teams and he had wanted an apology which would have the same publicity as the “attack” she had made on him.

The hearing continues.